The present disclosure relates to simplifying a large original XML model (e.g., a hierarchical data model) into a simpler XML model, and more specifically, a software tool for creating and manipulating modules.
Extensible markup language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, which are all gratis open standards.
XML includes or may be described with the following:
(Unicode) character: By definition, an XML document is a string of characters. Almost every legal Unicode character may appear in an XML document.
Processor and application: The processor analyzes the markup and passes structured information to an application. The specification places requirements on what an XML processor must do and not do, but the application is outside its scope. The processor (as the specification calls it) is often referred to colloquially as an XML parser.
Markup and content: The characters making up an XML document are divided into markup and content, which may be distinguished by the application of simple syntactic rules. Generally, strings that constitute markup either begin with the character < and end with a >, or they begin with the character & and end with a ;. Strings of characters that are not markup are content. In addition, whitespace before and after the outermost element is classified as markup.
Tag: A markup construct that begins with < and ends with >. Tags come in three types: start-tags, for example: <section>; end-tags, for example: </section>; empty-element tags, for example: <line-break />.
Element: A logical document component either begins with a start-tag and ends with a matching end-tag or consists only of an empty-element tag. The characters between the start- and end-tags, if any, are the element's content, and may contain markup, including other elements, which are called child elements.
Attribute: A markup construct consisting of a name/value pair that exists within a start-tag or empty-element tag.
XML is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, for example in web services. Many application programming interfaces (APIs) have been developed to aid software developers with processing XML data, and several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages.
An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constraints are generally expressed using some combination of grammatical rules governing the order of elements, Boolean predicates that the content must satisfy, data types governing the content of elements and attributes, and more specialized rules such as uniqueness and referential integrity constraints.